Central tendency and serial dependence in vestibular path integration - experiment scripts

Path integration, the process of updating one’s position using successive self-motion signals, has previously been studied using visual distance reproduction tasks in which optic flow patterns provide information about traveled distance. These studies have reported that reproduced distances show two types of systematic biases: central tendency and serial dependence. In the present study, we investigated whether these biases are also present in vestibular path integration. Participants were seated on a linear motion platform and performed a distance reproduction task in total darkness. The platform first passively moved the participant a pre-defined stimulus distance which they then actively reproduced by steering the platform back the same distance. Stimulus distances were sampled from short- and long-distance probability distributions and presented in either a randomized order or in separate blocks to study the effect of presentation context. Similar to the effects observed in visual path integration, we found that reproduced distances showed an overall positive central tendency effect as well as a positive, attractive serial dependence effect. Furthermore, reproduction behavior was affected by presentation context. These results were mostly consistent with predictions of a Bayesian Kalman-filter model, originally proposed for visual path integration. This collection is open access and consists of the experiment scripts which are licensed by the GNU General Public License v3.0. More information about the content of this collection and the experiment can be found in the attached documentation file (Folder_contents_information.pdf). Note that this collection supplements the main collection which can be found here: https://doi.org/10.34973/rgry-c088. The main collection is open access for registered users and consists of the raw, pre-processed and analyzed reproduction data as well as the analysis and modeling scripts.